Mushrooms May Communicate With Each Other Using Electrical Impulses

A computer scientist found the average fungal lexicon contains 50 words

Elizabeth Gamillo
Daily Correspondent

April 12, 2022



Mushrooms on a log may each seem like quiet, standalone organisms, but they're actually the above-ground, sporing fruit belonging to a fungus, connected to the large organism by a root network called mycelium. Although fungi may not seem very talkative either, a new study shows electric signals traveling through their mycelium network could help the organism communicate.Perhaps the most prolific of the group, split-gill mushrooms produced "remarkably diverse" signal patterns. Tõnu Pani via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0


Mushrooms on a log may each seem like quiet, standalone organisms, but they're actually the above-ground, sporing fruit belonging to a fungus, connected to the large organism by a root network called mycelium. Although fungi may not seem very talkative either, a new study shows electric signals traveling through their mycelium network could help the organism communicate.

Published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the paper concludes some fungi use electrical impulses to share and process information internally. When signal activity spikes, it creates intricate patterns that may function like words in human speech. It is estimated fungi vocabulary could consist of about 50 words, reports Leila Fadel of NPR's Morning Edition.

Previous research has found fungi can send electrical impulses underground through long, thread-like structures called hyphae, which expand to form a network of mycelium, reports Linda Geddes for the Guardian. Hyphae sort of work like nerve cells transmitting signals to other parts of the human body. Some studies have shown electrical activity increases when the hyphae of wood-digesting fungi touch wooden blocks, which may indicate fungi use these impulses to share information about food or injury, per the Guardian.

In the new study, four fungi species—ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune), and enoki fungi—were analyzed. Study author Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West England, eavesdropped on the fungi's chit-chat using tiny electrodes connected to hyphae to measure spikes in signal activity.

Each spike in activity was organized into groups and given a linguistic and information complexity analysis. Spikes varied in duration and length, with some impulses lasting up to 21 hours. The clusters of electrical points resembled a human vocabulary of up to 50 words. However, only 15 to 20 fungal words are used frequently. Fungal words are also similar in length to human words.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mushrooms-may-communicate-with-each-other-using-electrical-impulses-180979889/